LRRD Newsletter

Welcome to Volume 29, Number 11 of Livestock Research for Rural Development

LRRD is fully OPEN ACCESS, with no publication charges, on the principle that research findings related to sustainability of farming systems should be freely available in the public domain.
Papers may be copied and reprinted freely.

The Editorial committee of LRRD have long recognized the unsustainable basis
of "industrial" live stock production
systems, the development of which was facilitated, and is still sustained, by
readily available fossil fuels (which until 2008 were also of very low price).
As has been stated by many commentators and analysts (see recent reviews by: Leng www.mekarn.org/workshops/environ/proenv/lengnew.htm)
and Preston (www.mekarn.org/workshops/environ/proenv/pres.htm), this situation must change as resources are finite and climate change is inevitable. Systems of live stock production must also change to meet the challenges of food and energy production in a warming, resource-depleting world. The mission of LRRD is to promote research which will respond to these challenges by developing farming systems which are: "localized, multi-crop, energy and water efficient, with a negative carbon footprint, are socially just and self-sustaining".

The LRRD Vision

The
future requirements of society for food and energy can best be met from integrated
small to medium family farm systems in which:

·all resources are produced locally,

·the direct and indirect use of solar energy is
maximized,

·all wastes are recycled;

·the carbon footprint is negative;

·there are overall environmental and social
benefits.

The LRRD mission

To promote research on:

1.use of local resources for live stock
production in ways that are non-competitive with human needs;

2.development of systems for producing renewable energy by:

a.biodigestion of animal and human organic
wastes;

b.gasification of dry fibrous residues from crops grown primarily as
food/feed for humans and live stock;

c. solar voltaic
panels

3.promotion of indigenous live stock
breeds that have high reproductive rates and adaptation to use of local feed
resources and local climatic conditions;

4.regeneration of soil fertility through promotion of tree
crops and recycling of organic matter

5.development of emerging markets for ecosystem
services, such as carbon sequestration and nutrient sequestration.

758 papers were submitted to LRRD in 2016; 235 papers were published (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Papers
submitted and published 2014-16

Ethiopia and Algeria are the countries at the head of the list of submitted papers, followed
by Nigeria, Indonesia, Colombia, Brazil, Kenya, Tanzania, Laos, Ghana, Cuba,
India, Ecuador and Vietnam (Figure 2). Papers were submitted from 60 countries in 2016, compared with 55 in 2015.

Figure 2: Papers submitted to LRRD during 2016 (not listed are papers received from 40 other countries that sent from 1 to 9 papers)

Daily visits to the LRRD web page in 2016 were close to 4000 (Figure 3). The average time to process the papers published in 2016 was 103 days, divided
between the time taken in the review process (69 days) and in final
editing and formatting in HTML (34 days).

Figure 3. Daily
visits to the LRRD web site from 2013- 2017

It is not possible to compute a true annual rejection rate as papers
submitted towards the end of a year may not be reviewed until the following
year. On the basis of the papers received and published over the past three years (Figure
1) the average acceptance rate has fallen from 49% in 2014, to 41% in 2015 and
31% in 2016. This decline in the acceptance rate is because the number of papers
submitted has increased steadily from 480 in 2014, to 607 in 2015 and to
758 in 2016. The editorial capacity of LRRD, which is managed on a
voluntary basis, is of the order of 240 papers processed per year (20 per
month), thus we had to raise the bar on the criteria for acceptance. This has
been done by not accepting for processing (in the majority of
cases but with some exceptions depending on circumstances) papers that are
based only on surveys.

The rapid growth in papers received and published during the last 5 years
has put considerable pressure on the editorial team which, as we have often
pointed out, is composed of professional scientists (most of them
self-employed), who give their time freely to promote the mission of
LRRD. The journal does not receive financial support from any quarter and
does not employ secretaries or technical assistants. All activities are done
online by electronic mail or through the Web pages of LRRD (http://www.lrrd.org). In this
medium, constantly under pressure from Spam and viruses, papers and
communications to and from authors may be mislaid or lost permanently. The
editorial team take all possible precautions to avoid disruption of the
editorial process, but mistakes are inevitable.

Authors are therefore requested to:

Ensure that the reference to their paper (first four
letters of their email address and the date (in the format: year, month,
days; eg: prest170802) is always typed on the subject line
of any communication

Send a message to the Chief Editor if there has been no
response, within a period of 14 days, to their queries or
communications. The editorial team welcomes such reminders, which
facilitate the efficient processing of papers through the reviewing,
editing and formatting stages.

Read carefully the "Notestoauthors", paying
particular attention to the formatting of tables. figures and references.

Send the original spreadsheet data when graphs are
included in the paper.

LRRD has its own domain "lrrd.org". It is
published by the NGO CIPAV, but the independent web site is in keeping with its role as
an international medium for research in sustainable livestock-based
agriculture. The change also facilitates the gathering of statistics on access
to the site.

Receipt of papers is usually confirmed the day they arrive and almost always
they are sent to reviewers the same day. We expect reviewers to send
recommendations to the Assistant-editors (or Chief Editor), as to acceptance of
papers for publication in LRRD, and comments, within two weeks of receiving the
paper.

It will also decrease our work load and speed up publication, if authors
follow carefully the style and format of LRRD by consulting published papers in
recent issues of LRRD. Attention is drawn to the style of references and tables which
is where most mistakes are made.

Please read the section on "Norms for preparation of papers for LRRD" for details. Failure to observe the LRRD norms for
editing papers will inevitably lead to delays in publication, because of the
additional work load this causes for the Editors.

A paper written for LRRD in "html" has a number of supporting
files including the "style" of headings and the images of graphs and
photos. This creates some difficulties for editors and authors for the final
"proof-reading" of the papers when these are sent by E-mail, as the editors have to ensure that the supporting
files are attached along with the paper; and the author, when she / he receives
the paper, has to put all the files in the same folder to be sure that
when the paper is opened it will appear complete on the screen. To avoid
these inconveniences, each paper as it is edited is being made available as a
provisional "url" which is communicated to
authors when the final version of their paper is ready in html format. Authors
can then check the paper for possible errors or last minute corrections and
inform the editors accordingly.

HTML ('HyperText
Markup Language')

HTML is the native language for publishing documents on the World Wide Web
and is understood by all Web browsing software. The journal, as the principal
means of publication of developing world sustainable agriculture, needs to be
easily available to the widest possible audience of interested people. Using
HTML as the on online publishing format has three principal advantages. The
first is that everybody who finds the journal can read it with their Internet
browser (Firefox, Chrome, Yahoo and Internet Explorer are amongst the most
common). Secondly, the Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo will
index the pages. Thirdly, articles can be posted on the Web as soon as
they are formatted in HTML, thus increasing tremendously the speed of
communication of information.

All previous issues of the journal have now been converted to HTML format
(thanks to CIPAV staff in Colombia), thus there is available on the Internet
through the CIPAV web pages a library of 28years of research in the
field of developing world sustainable agriculture.